The silence behind me told me that Marlon and Angie were both doing the geometry—and coming to the same exact conclusion.
We were going to both have to test the strength of the ice in the center of the river. Or rather… we were going to end up testing the strength of the ice in the center of the river. Because there was no way we were going to make the coming turn any other way.
“Guys, I need some agreement here!” I shouted when neither of them had responded. “We don’t have a lot of time to come up with alternatives!”
We were already almost at the curve. If we were going to cut further toward the bank of the river, we had to do it now.
“Well, if we have to, we have to!” Angie finally said. “Call it out, John!”
“Lean to your right!” I screamed. “Gently! We don’t want to run up on the bank, but we’ve got to get as close as we can! At my command, start leaning harder!” I felt the tension behind me and knew that both of my teammates were holding the sides of the sled and leaning forward, every piece of their beings focused on me as they awaited the command.
I waited until I thought we could start cutting the corner without actually running up into the mud—which would slow us down, at best, and send us end-over-end, at worst.
“Lean!” I shouted when we hit the point I’d marked.
We all leaned to the right, and the sled started to slide closer and closer to the bank. Closer… and then too close.
“Sit up!” I screamed.
Behind me, the weight of the sled shifted and we were suddenly moving straight again, and not a moment too soon. We hit a spot where the mud reached further out into the river than anywhere else, and the sled went up the slight ramp and was airborne for a moment.
I held my breath, terrified at the thought of coming down, and when we slammed back down into the ice I was already tensed and ready to jump ship, certain that the ice was going to shatter.
But it didn’t. Instead, we shot through the turn and right toward the center of the river.
“Lean right, hard!” I screamed.
We all threw our weight to the right, the sled lifting up on the left side and carving over the ice in a sled’s version of going up on two wheels, as I watched the river ahead of us, holding my breath. We were going far too fast to stop now, and I wasn’t sure we were going to turn quickly enough. I wasn’t even sure we were going to keep going. The sled was rushing right toward the center point of the river, and I remembered Marlon’s words about the thickness of the ice out here, terrified. What if it was too thin to hold us? What if we went right through it and into the water—and then under the ice—and there was no one up there to save us? What if this was the way it all ended?
Then the sled was turning away from the center, and moving back toward the shore, the parabola of our path pushing us closer and closer to the safety of the thicker ice. I watched our progress, measuring it for when we needed to stop turning, though, because it wasn’t going to do any of us any good if we overshot it and ended up in the forest on our side of the river.
I waited until I thought that we were on safer footing—or icing—and then called for everyone to lean slightly left. I needed us to get the sled back to where it was running parallel to the shore, rather than straight toward it. The timing was perfect, and the change in weight distribution turned the sled slightly, pushing the nose so that it was traveling forward rather than toward the shore. Thirty seconds later and we were back in the prime position, about ten feet from the shore and shooting forward on the ice.
At that point, I finally let out the breath I’d been holding and allowed my shoulders to relax. For the moment, at least, we’d achieved a sort of victory.
“Marlon, how much further do we think we have to go before we hit Ellis Woods?” I asked. I wanted to hear that we were almost there. I wanted to hear that this wild ride was almost finished.
I desperately wanted to hear that I was going to be able to deliver my wife to safety soon.
“I’m guessing a mile more!” he called back. “If we’ve managed to lose Randall and his men, we should be in town before they can get to us again.”
If. It was an awfully big question. But right now, for just a moment, I was willing to let myself believe that we might have done just that.
24
We maintained our forward momentum for the next half an hour, and though we heard occasional shots in the distance behind us, they never came close to us.
The knowledge that Randall and his men were still back there chewed at me. I didn’t like the idea that we didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. And I really didn’t like the idea that they could show up again at virtually any moment. They shouldn’t have been able to catch up to us the way they did. Not when they were at least half a day behind us, and not when we’d done so much to put them off the trail. Yeah, we’d taken a couple hours off from traveling when Angie went into the water, because we’d had to get her warmed up.
That shouldn’t have given them enough time to catch us. It shouldn’t have given them enough time to get settled in the trees and turn their guns on us.
There was something there that wasn’t right. Something that was making my instincts scream. Unfortunately, my screaming instincts weren’t giving me anything definitive, and that was a problem. Something was wrong—but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Which was not only frustrating, but also frightening. I’d made a living off of letting my instincts rule me in Afghanistan, and they’d never led me wrong. They’d also never taken so freaking long to give me an answer.
I was just starting to go through things in my head one more time when the tree line in front of us suddenly broke and I saw… buildings.
Buildings that I recognized.
“We’re here!” I screamed, too excited to keep my voice down or try to come up with anything more sophisticated. “Ellis Woods, dead ahead! We’ve got about five hundred more feet, folks, and we’re home.”
I didn’t think I’d ever been so excited to see human civilization in my life. And that included the time I’d spent three full months in the desert of Afghanistan with only one other man for company.
Behind me, Angie screeched in excitement, and I could hear Marlon chuckling to himself—no doubt as surprised as I was that we’d actually made it.
“Right, we aim for the gentlest part of the shore we can find!” I shouted, my mind already running through the options here. I had legitimately never thought about how we were going to stop once we got to town—partially because there had been so many other things to worry about, and partially because I hadn’t been sure we were ever going to make it to town.
Now I saw this as a desperately bad lack of planning.
We were going fast enough that I didn’t think we could just put our feet down to slow the sled anymore. We would run the risk of doing serious damage to our feet, ankles, and knees doing that—and might actually flip the sled, in which case we’d be in danger of damaging a lot more than just our limbs. Literally the only way we could slow the sled was to get it up on the mud and ice of the shore, and hope the sled just slowed down, rather than flipping and sending us all flying into the air.
Of course, first we were going to have to get to the other side of the river. Which meant we were going to have to once again cross over the center of the river—and the thin ice there. I was just going to grit my teeth and hope we were moving fast enough to skim over the top of the ice without causing too many problems.